Description & Documentation

Defaka and Nkoroo

About The Languages

Location

Defaka & Nkoroo are spoken in a handful of villages in the Niger Delta, approximately 70 km southeast of Port Harcourt. Both languages are marked on the linguistic map of Nigeria below:

(Maps courtesy of Ethnologue/SIL)

Classification

Defaka and Nkoroo are often thought to be related to Ijo languages (see Williamson & Blench 2000, Jenewari 1983). However, this relationship is much clearer for Nkoroo than for Defaka. Both languages share a number of grammatical features with Ijo, such as a default S-O-V word order, and masculine-feminine-neuter gender distinctions in 3rd-person singular pronouns.